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By Nkrumah Lucien
May 2nd 2007I was sitting on a mini-bus thinking about Prime Minister Sir John Compton’s budget presentation and his promise of a ‘relevant’ education system. His definition was that a relevant education system was one that satisfied the needs of the job market. It was in keeping with the notion, which has been recently revived, that what has been lacking in our education system is the willingness to cater adequately to the provision of more vocational and skills training. This, in the mind of some, is why we have so many of our youth on the streets and such a growing problem with drugs, violence and crime. I wondered how different this definition of education might be from that implemented in the immediate aftermath of Emancipation. However, education is the crux of the progress of any society and must be understood in a wider context than only formal schooling.
This overly simplistic idea of education is the root of much of the problems which “Third World” societies face. Education is understood largely as a quantitative function; the wider qualitative aspect of it seems to have been lost to successive regimes in St. Lucia. In this budget, there is little indication that this will change. Such an apolitical and unempowering notion of education has consistently failed everyone involved, including those “educated” and their “Third World” nations. As a result, it has persisted as a tool to continue the dominance of our psyches, societies, economies, media and politics by the First World interests and agendas. The beneficiaries of these education systems have always been their initiators, the imperialist countries of the “First World”. These are among the last vestiges of the old colonialism; the new ones of course are found in economic hitmen (1), International Financial Organizations, “Free” Trade and pseudo-objectivity all in a skewed world. A relevant education system is a complex function and cannot be reduced entirely to economic terms.
A number of challenges present themselves for anyone who dares approach the task of transforming a 160-year-old, irrelevant system marred with all sorts of agendas and flawed perspectives, into one which can take a nation such as ours forward. What is the nature of the nation that this system is to serve? This is a nation of a predominantly non-White population composed primarily of Africans, in which women have consistently been deprived of their due from the days when the “democracies” of the White Imperialist System refused them any role in the politics of their nations, as a reflection of the backward misogyny of their societies. We have deeply entrenched in our societies, what Dr. Marimba Ani, in her essay, Hypocrisy as a Culture, (2) called the ‘Rhetoric ethic’, which is opportunistic, hypocritical and glorifies deceit and a general lack of integrity.
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This is actually a very interesting article which highlights certain aspects of the education system in countries such as this. This demonstrates the immense difference between our system and other systems across the world. I suggest that people ra
Source: Trinicentre
